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a handkerchief from my pocket and tied it tightly round my leg.
    The enemy had been beaten off--for the moment. We had a period of respite, but it might well be brief and we made the most of it. Porta noisily consumed his fifth tin of Corned beef, Barcelona passed round a bottle of gin, the Old Man played idly with a pack of cards. Behind us, Formigny was on fire. The heavy Wellington bombers were in the air over Caen and the flames rose high into the sky. The ground beneath us trembled and shook, as if in anticipation of. some catastrophe.
    In an abandoned Jeep Porta had found an old gramophone and some discs. We played them one after another, drunk with the sudden sound of music after the hideous and familiar sounds of battle, and when we had come to the last one we started over again at the beginning. We were on our third time round when a group of soldiers came up to us out of the dim light. They seemed unarmed. They carried a flag decorated with a large red cross, and their helmets bore the same emblem. Little John snatched up his rifle, but before he could fire the Old Man had knocked it angrily from his grasp.
    'What the hell do you think you're playing at?'
    Little John turned on him indignantly.
    'Why are they only taking care of their own wounded? What's wrong with ours?'
    'Anyone fires on the Red Cross,' said the Old Man, grimly, 'and he gets a bullet from me straight through the eyes. Is that clear?'
    There was a moment's uneasy silence, then Porta laughed.
    'You're in the wrong war, Old Man! You ought to join the Sally Army, you'd be a general in no time!'
    He turned and spat, but the Old Man wisely held his peace. No one showed any inclination to pick up a rifle.
    The last of the wounded had been collected, the last of the stretcher-bearers was on his way back to enemy lines. All was peaceful. And then, suddenly, further up in the trenches, a young lieutenant gave a sharp cry and fell down in the mud. A bullet from a maquisard had found its mark. Another came sizzling across to us, and within seconds the whole bloody fight had started up again. Three machine-guns rattled out their reply and some of the stretcher-bearing party fell. The Legionnaire was on his feet before the rest of us and was running ahead, yelling to us to follow, as he had done so often before, on the frozen Russian steppes, on the slopes of Monte Cassino.
    In the fierce skirmish that ensued, almost the entire stretcher party and the wounded they had collected were wiped out. The ground was once more strewn with the bodies of men from both sides. A new stretcher party was needed to pick up the new wounded. Attack, counterattack. Death was the order of the day.
    There was no quarter given in Section 91.

CHAPTER TWO

    Porta was playing about with the radio set, twiddling the knobs this way and that, attempting to isolate the sonorous voice of the B.B.C. from all the other wild gabblings and cracklings that were going on.
    'You're crazy,' said Heide, in disgust. 'You get caught at that game and you'll be for the chopping block and no questions asked... What the hell's the point, anyway? You can't believe a word they tell you even when you've got them.'
    Porta held up a hand.
    'Put a sock in it, for Christ's sake! This is it coming through now.'
    Sounds as of someone striking a heavy gong; very deliberate and menacing. And then the cold, correct voice of the B.B.C:
    'Ici Londres, ici Londres. B.B.C. pour la France...'
    Of course, what we didn't then realize was that practically the whole of the French resistance movement was also listening in to the broadcast.
    'Ici Londres, ici Londres... May we have your attention, please. Here are some personal messages: "Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne." I will repeat that: "Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne" (The long sobs of the autumnal violins).'
    It was the first line of a poem, "La Chanson d'automne", by Verlaine. The message for which everyone had been waiting for many weeks.